andré parente

We aimed at bringing together, in this book, articles which have as their main objective making an ample and transdisciplinary public understand that, if we wish to understand the world we live in, whatever the domain considered, we shall have to think on the network nation. But if we elect the figure of the net as the main metaphor for us to understand the ongoing transformations, we cannot understand its importance and extension if we reduced it to the historical fact of the emergence of new communication and cyberspace technologies. The network notion perpasses nowadays almost all fields of the human and exact, pure and applied sciences. The network notion has been arousing such interest in the theoretical and practical works in fields so diverse as science, technology and art, that we have the impression of being before a new paradigm which lead to a thought of relations in opposition to a thought of the essences. The network thought is associated to at least three general themes, each of these comprising a part of the book: the network philosophy, the ethics and aethetic of the network as a new dimension of communication. Although the texts presented therein written by specialists in areas so diverse as philosophy, human and exact sciences, art and technology, provide us with different approaches as network issues, they share something in common: the network has become a dimension, indissociably ontological and practical, of model-setting of the world and of subjectivity.